Learning to Speak

Sadie adored the wallpaper. It had a pattern of Scooby Doo and Daisy Duck on a blue field. She would lie on the bed as close as she could get to the wall, which was always very cool given that the walls of the house were brick, and by pressing her cheek against it one of the Scoobies would get much, much bigger and take up all her eye could see. She almost fell into the crack between the bed and the wall. She did this long before she was diagnosed as myopic, or maybe just a year or so before she went to get her glasses with the striped frames.

She also loved her bookshelf, so high above her and closely loaded with tomes of fairytales, mythology with beautiful pictures, and more difficult books that had many sections all about the same story. Her mommy still provided the regular bed-time fare of Cat in the Hat, but she also knew all the pictures in Dr. Doolittle, and one day soon she’d be able to put those words together.

When Mommy and Daddy had parties in their sunken living room, her daddy played the guitar and sang songs about ladies from Winnipeg and terrible punishments for wandering folk singers. Once she crept downstairs to see what all the noise was about, and her natural Shirley Temple impersonation (as her grandma called it) was roundly appreciated by the guests. “Sadie, what chair does he mean?” one man asked her at the end of a long song mostly concerning a man killing his lover. “the electric chair!” she promptly replied, sending them rocking with laughter and nearly spilling their drinks. She wondered why giving the correct answer was so amusing to them.

She didn’t like the way her head hurt when her mommy combed her thick, curly hair, but it was the first step before she could put on the cowgirl outfit and boots, before she could pick up her horse and ride, put on her ten-gallon (1-gallon) hat. She would also stare at her mommy getting dressed to go out, always smelling of strong perfume and wearing heavy jewelry; she guessed rightly that this was her mommy’s favorite time, too.

Mrs. Stokes came over almost every afternoon to give her cookies and milk and to see that Sadie took her nap—which was always a time of resistance. Sadie would pout, and complain that her big sister was exempt. “Why doesn’t Diana have to take a nap? It’s not fair!” And Mrs. Stokes would just smile with the endless patience given her by years of looking after other people’s children, and say, “Sweetie, Diana is almost five years ahead of you! Diana’s doing her homework ! You should be happy to nap, I know I would be.” But Sadie’s little brow came down in her most scowling face, even seriously looking like a tantrum was coming on. No crying around Mrs. Stokes, though. Tantrums were saved for the teenage babysitters, who were more easily overpowered.

Instead of napping, Sadie would have liked to keep playing with Diana, who built whole highway networks out of building blocks. Mommy didn’t see the point of Barbie, so very often the girls would get little Corgi cars as gifts, miniature models of the real automobile that they would drive on these highways. Sadie had one in her collection that could be traced to a book, it was “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and had wings. She also had a James Bond Jaguar, which had a little button to expel the driver into an arc’d trajectory, most satisfyingly onto the carpet for as many times as she wanted.

One day she pretended to be napping, and instead snuck into her sister’s room. Diana’s room was clearly off limits to her, which made it that much more exciting to look around when no one was looking. The wallpaper had flowers, and there were shelves of glass animals just at Sadie’s nose-level. Her favorite was a blue horse with yellow eyes and red hooves; quite definitely made of glass, but which somehow always smiled a gamine grin at its beholder. “This horse should be mine” she thought to herself; it was just unfortunately stabled in Diana’s room, and needed her to visit and groom it. She also felt pretty warmly about a little pink ceramic pig, which had flowers dotting its back.

The bedroom was on a corner of the house and got a lot of sunlight. She reached up and took the horse over to the window, where she held it in a spotlight of slanting 4:00 sun, turning it around in her hand until a spark was kindled in the place she expected its heart to be. Then she went back to the shelves, reached up to replace it, and knocked the pig over. Instead of squealing, it broke into shards of pink ceramics, Sadie stepped back to survey the damage and thought maybe she should go back to her napping pose as quickly as she could. There was something awkward about her situation, but she wasn’t sure what might ensue, better to take up a position that was originally intended to last the afternoon.

Sadie studied her wallpaper until her mommy and sister came home from wherever it was they had been, they hadn’t explained it to her. She listened to Diana coming upstairs and into her room, she heard the dismayed cry, and then her sister’s running back downstairs and her mommy trying to soothe her tears. It was something terrible that had happened! She got up from her bed and edged her way to the head of stairs, where she heard the following exchange :

Her mommy said, “Mrs. Stokes can’t have done that, I’m sure!” and she could hear Diana, just bawling away over the pig. Sadie came downstairs and watched them from the door of the kitchen. Finally, her mommy decided that Mrs. Stokes had broken the delicate animal while cleaning the shelves. She watched her mommy ask Mrs. Stokes about it, she heard Mrs. Stokes deny that she was in any way involved in the murder of this pig. Sadie saw Mrs. Stokes take a sideways glance at her, as she stood uncertainly in the doorway sucking her thumb. But she could not pronounce the words that would have told the truth, and Mrs. Stokes was blamed.